Retrospectare
by somethinguntraceable
Summary: Tyrell Badd is not a detective for nothing.  Byrne Faraday/Calisto Yew/Tyrell Badd


**Title:** _Retrospectare_**  
Author:** Everworld2662**  
Length:** One-off, ~6000 words.**  
Fandom:** Gyakuten Kenji/Ace Attorney: Investigations  
**Pairings/Characters:** Byrne Faraday/Calisto Yew/Tyrell Badd.  
**Summary:** Tyrell Badd is not a detective for nothing.  
**Genre:** Angst/Romance, as per usual_  
_**Rating:** M  
**Warnings:** SPOILERS for the last case of Gyakuten Kenji. Uh. Many liberties taken with characterization? OT3. Lack of research on my behalf.  
**Set:** Between KG-8 and "the second KG-8", i.e., the Yatagarasu Years~!

**Note: **This is completely dedicated to (and outrageously informed by) bethfrish's _The Last Job_, which can be found over at LiveJournal, and is the first (!) Byrne/Calisto/Tyrell in existence, I believe, and helped me write this more than I care to admit.

**A/N: **I have no excuse or rationale for this. Just that it's inconceivable to me, for some reason, that there was not some serious OT3 going on within the Yatagarasu. Three years, guys. Three years of being Epic Partners in Epic Crime, and keeping the secret from everybody else. Three years of late-night planning, breaking into buildings together, hiding evidence, manipulating trials, and prosecuting the hell out of every nefarious creep in the business world. Just. Yeah.

**A/N 2: **Also, I don't care how awesome Little Thief is. Byrne Faraday would have had to have been seriously badass to get around all those security systems and plan all those heists, even with technological aid. Thus my nigh Messianic! Byrne. Also that and Badd's a little biased, to say the least. XD

* * *

Tyrell Badd is not a detective for nothing.

Now, safely after the event, he has to admit that he expected something like this; anticipated it, even, from the very beginning. Glimpsed it, briefly, in the symmetrical streak of tears down each of Calisto's cheeks when she fumbled her way towards the central aisle where he was standing—still anonymous, at this point, still nothing more than the figure who had burst into tears in the front row of the gallery when the verdict was announced, a figure Badd now suspects was laughing, not crying; laughing hysterically with her eyes shut tight and two hands pressed over her mouth to keep the sounds of amusement from getting out—

Or maybe when she hits him is when he realizes: at the jolt of contact, and the little red imprint Byrne had pointed out afterwards, that her ring had left behind on his right cheek. No: that was when he realized she had a secret, but not _the _secret; only the one she had fabricated to misdirect them, to explain her inescapable silence, and darkness. A trick of distraction, of keeping them occupied: a broken past worn on her fingers to keep them from looking closer at her heart. Calisto Yew, it seems, deals in distractions, in mirages; colours, artifice, fireworks that attract the eye—like her laughter, that one thing which is real but that she presents as a ploy, openly, obviously, painting herself comical and letting you see the brushstrokes. Letting you think you have pegged her.

Later, Tyrell calls it a slap. Calisto calls it a punch. Byrne isn't sure, although he witnessed it, rigid behind the prosecutor's bench, watching the lead detective on the case—his unflappable witness who hadn't backed down even as the odds stacked against them, who had kept a straight face, although somewhat paler, despite words like _circumstantial _and _hearsay _getting thrown back and forth like a ball in a squash match, bounding off the courtroom walls with increasing velocity—that man, that _giant_—crumple from a woman's backhand.

"Who is she?" he'd asked, later, when they were the only two left in the courtroom, both finding it difficult to just pack up years of work and walk away.

"Cece's sister," Tyrell says flatly, and Byrne thinks that makes sense, that he saw something of Cece in that sharp, professional blow.

* * *

It begins when _Cece's sister _becomes _Calisto Yew _in their minds, and then, eventually, _Calisto_. Tyrell reaches this conclusion a little later than Byrne, but he reaches it nonetheless, and he pinpoints the epiphany to the afternoon that Ms. Yew, soon to be Calisto, arrives at the park a couple of blocks down from the precinct and doesn't even look surprised to see either of them there.

Instead, her eyes narrow, and she tugs up her collar like a shield and crosses her arms over her chest. It makes her look cold, and small, and Tyrell wonders, briefly, if that's the idea.

"I thought I said I never wanted to see you again." She speaks to him only, her gaze skipping over Byrne like a pebble skittering over water. "You let Cece's killer go free. And now you have the gall to lure me here with cryptic messages; for what? How could you possibly make up for my loss, Detective?"

"You're a defence attorney, aren't you?"

"Yes," she says, like saying, _so?_, but she doesn't seem quite as disturbed by his non-answer as he expects.

"The prosecutor here has a suggestion for you."

Now she looks towards Byrne, finally, but after half a second of eye-contact her gaze darts up to his hairline instead. "You're Byrne Faraday," she says to this intersection of forehead and hair. "_You're_ the one who couldn't get Manny Coachen convicted; who spouted that ridiculous nonsense about decisive evidence and then failed to produce it. Well; I have something for you, Faraday."

Tyrell knows, instinctively, that Byrne isn't going to defend himself, and so he steps in, catches Calisto's arm as it rises in its threatening swing. And thinks: _Calisto_. _When did that happen?_ Aloud, he says, "No," and manages an awkward smile, halting, caught in his throat. "No, I don't think so. I was in charge of that evidence, not Faraday." A lie, but not one that matters. Not like the ones that will follow. "You don't have anything to give him, Ms. Yew."

She pulls her arm from his grasp with an angry sound. "Then what _is _it, Detective? And you, Faraday; what do you want?"

"We want—"

The prosecutor breaks off, looking slightly shaken, and throws an apologetic look in Tyrell's direction. Stoically, Tyrell offers him a nod of encouragement. Bryne, of course, knows his lie, even if Calisto Yew does not, and the crime scene photos of Cece's murder are too well committed to memory to leave either of them unaffected.

"We want to—prevent this kind of thing from happening again."

"And how do you propose to do that?" Calisto asks. Her tone has changed, gone professional, and she looks towards Byrne like he is a client trying to convince her to let him organize his own defence: polite, but firm. It's the first proper look she's given him all night.

"That evidence that went missing…well, we think it was stolen." Byrne steals another glance towards Detective Badd, a little guilty this time when Tyrell, impatient, returns nothing but a stony glare.

"Do you?"

Calisto isn't giving them anything, and Byrne is going quiet, and despite himself, Tyrell feels a spike of irritation. It vanishes quickly enough as soon as he reminds himself that he's Byrne's partner and that it's his job to watch Byrne's back—even if he sometimes needs more watching than is normal. They've worked too many cases together for Badd to resent it anymore; and truthfully, it's not resentment he feels but fear, and worry, and some other, more complex emotion that boils moodily within him like water in a kettle. In any case, the prosecutor has left a silence for him to fill, and if he isn't quite so eloquent as Byrne, Tyrell will make up for it with volume.

"Yeah, we do. And if they can steal our evidence, why can't we steal theirs?"

Calisto looks at him, her curiosity masked behind coldness. "Steal…evidence?"

"That's right." Badd fumbles in his pocket for his packet of cigarettes, the comfort of a slowly inhaled suicide. "Steal evidence. We won't be able to touch Coachen, I'm afraid, but we can go higher."

"I don't understand. What are you suggesting, Detective?"

Before Badd can answer, Byrne breaks in.

"No, Ms. Yew, you _do _understand."

Finally, passion has overcome the prosecutor's silence: he moves forward suddenly, a couple of strands falling loose from his ponytail, disarrayed by his earnestness. Badd, standing to the side, is unsurprised and not a little blasé. This ritual is familiar to him, and tiring: the coaxing, the waiting, the muddled speeches delivered in a gruff undertone by yours truly—Byrne Faraday has learnt a great deal over the years, but confidence still does not come easy.

"I _know_ you understand. We may not have been able to prosecute your sister's murderer, but we still have a shot at prosecuting those who ordered her death. _We go higher_."

"You're speaking in riddles, Mr. Faraday," Calisto answers blackly, hiding a scowl, but she does not look over at Detective Badd anymore, and she has stopped looking small.

"No, I'm not." Byrne is speaking breathlessly, eyes bright with exhilaration. Badd has seen him like this before, in the courtroom. "It's quite simple: we _steal _it, Ms. Yew. We both know the Cohdopian embassy is responsible for Cece's death. Detective Badd and I had evidence that proved as much; it was stolen. Well, _they can't steal all our evidence_. Must I really speak plainer, Ms. Yew, or are you done pretending not to understand me?"

This is the moment, Tyrell thinks, in which he first begins to doubt her. With his cigarette jammed brazenly between his teeth, fishing one-handed in his coat for a lighter and watching Byrne give a speech worthy of a goddamn prophet after the requisite fifteen minutes of crippling schoolgirl shyness—this is the moment, surely, when Calisto Yew shows the first shade of her true colours.

"I'm done," she tells Byrne, quietly. "Mr. Faraday, I'm done."

She comes closer to them, not small or cold looking at all anymore, and holds a lighter conciliatorily up to Badd's face. He nods, and she lights his cigarette for him, shielding the flame from the breeze with her hand. The moment lingers: two, three seconds, and then Calisto looks back towards Byrne. Relieved, Tyrell inhales deeply, and examines the expression on her face for the barest of moments before his gaze follows hers. Perhaps this is why he misses it; perhaps he looked away too quickly, too easily distracted by Byrne and his far-seeing eyes. As usual, the defence attorney doesn't seem to notice them looking. His scarf is billowing slightly in the wind.

Tyrell sees nothing to distrust in Calisto Yew that day, nothing.

* * *

Thankfully, there are other moments to sift through, each ablaze with possibility. Without much difficulty, Tyrell lands on another that seems particularly promising: the evening after their first conviction, when Calisto suggests they celebrate. He remembers the moment vividly: her shrug when Byrne asks her what she has in mind; the way her eyes light up, mischievous. There, he thinks, _there_. _This is surely when Detective Badd realizes this woman's capacity for deception is too great to be constrained_.

After a little deliberation, they end up going to the port district instead of hitting the dance floor, because Calisto says there are few clubs that will grant entrance to a forty-something detective in a shot out old trench-coat. Tyrell takes it as a compliment—after all, his forty-something days are over—and smiles; admits he likes the broad-walk much better. Byrne agrees. The three of them stand looking at the sea a little while, interspersed along the railing at a comfortable distance from each other. After a few minutes, Byrne undoes his ponytail and lets his hair fall forwards, light and lanky. Tyrell is struck, watching him, by how unheroic their hero looks; how cheerfully worn and tattered the Yatagarasu's mouthpiece is.

"Congratulations," Calisto says beside him, unusually warm, and Tyrell looks around to see her addressing Byrne with a smile. "Today was all you, Faraday. You really are quite a prosecutor."

Byrne laughs and shakes his head, slouching over the railing until Badd's almost afraid he'll fall in. "A prosecutor is the sum of his evidence, Calisto. I learnt that the day we met, and it hasn't changed. This was the Yatagarasu's triumph. This was _ours_."

"Alright," Calisto concedes, easily, but Tyrell suspects it's not an honest surrender: how can it be? If Calisto is the brains of their little criminal trio, Byrne is its heart and lungs. Badd, meanwhile, is its silence, and its shrewdness. Mostly, he's quite happy with this, but there are some moments—moments like these—where he wishes he could speak.

* * *

Tyrell doesn't realize it's obvious until Calisto tells him so, leaned up against him and the railing at what is fast becoming their favourite spot on the broad-walk. It is another night entirely, several months past their first discovery of the district, and Byrne has been gone for an entire eight minutes, holding conversation with his daughter Kay on his cellular: little Kay who has awoken from a nightmare, and knows her father well enough to dial his number when she finds his bed empty. The Yatagarasu's continual presence here would be indiscreet if it weren't past five in the morning, and if the city wasn't hours from the sea. But it is, and lawyers and detectives do not come here, only thieves.

As usual, Calisto is too subtle to admit to what she knows directly. Instead, she couches it as a question, ostensibly innocuous, about how long he and Faraday have worked together, followed by a smile that completes the end of her sentence: _and when did you fall in love with him?_ Tyrell's glad she doesn't say it aloud; he isn't sure _fall in love_ is the right term for what's happened with Byrne—no, he's _certain_, although he doesn't voice it.

"Years," he says instead, simply, and Calisto looks at him thoughtfully. Tyrell turns his gaze outward again, over the sea; comfortable, by now, with her eyes on him. After a little while, when he is just starting to wonder if the silence has moved beyond companionable into awkward, Calisto slides her forearms out over the railing, deliberately drawing his eye to the movement, and twists her silver ring—the one that left an impression on his cheek when they first met—off her finger. She lets it drop.

"Your turn."

Tyrell blinks, and resists the urge to examine his fingers for a ring he might have forgotten—barely. "I don't do grand gestures, Calisto."

"Perhaps you should." Wrinkling her face, Calisto slides her hand from the rail into his jacket pocket, her long fingers briefly fumbling at his waist until they find the cardboard corners of his cigarette packet. Unresisting, and faintly curious, Tyrell watches her rub at the anti-smoking disclaimer with her thumb; after a brief examination, she rotates the packet in her fingers to read the logo, and then, suddenly, opens her fist over the sea. "Byrne hates it when you chain-smoke, Tyrell."

It's been raining, and her hair smells of salt when she leans over and kisses his cheek apologetically. Incongruous: Calisto Yew is so young, so pretty. A butterfly lingering around a pair of dying flowers. It should make no sense, ring bells like alarms that bring entire security platoons running, but Byrne has never set one of those off, and neither does Calisto, for all of her colours.

Later, she drives him to the corner store to buy another pack. Sometimes, just sometimes, Tyrell wishes he had a car, but public transport's easily half the price of petrol in this city, and he'll be damned if he lets himself get ripped off like that. There's some oddly nostalgic country music on Calisto's old car radio when they pull up, that Tyrell is half-heartedly enjoying, and so when Calisto offers to run his errand for him, he doesn't protest overly much. She is, after all, the one who dropped a packet of perfectly good Marlboros into the sea. It isn't until they're several blocks away, and have reached the chaotic, mildly dangerous intersection that segregates downtown from the district renowned for its drive-by shootings, that Calisto reaches into the backseat for her handbag. Tyrell fumbles for the wheel in a moment half instinct, half panic, and after the longest five seconds he has experienced in his life so far—later, he'll know longer—Calisto re-emerges and presses something, one handed, into his palm. It isn't a pack of cigarettes, it's a lollipop.

"It tastes better," she says. Her attention, thankfully, has reverted to the road ahead, and Tyrell's glare is left to fizzle uselessly into the side of her neck. "And it's just as fidgety. Trust me, you'll thank me later."

Detective Badd likes to think he doesn't do either.

* * *

Things after that are smooth, and simple, and superficial for a little while, until they come up, in January, against the BLU Corporation. Unlike the others, this company doesn't fall easily: the security system is a struggle even for Byrne and Little Thief, and one evening of light drinking reveals that Calisto is having trouble getting her hands on blueprints. They start working longer, more uncomfortable hours, and it becomes less easy to turn the Yatagarasu in them on and off like a light switch.

One such evening, Tyrell leaves Calisto and Byrne in the living room, annotating some case files from a previous attempt at prosecuting BLU Corp, to go splash at his face with water and make some more coffee. It's half four, and none of them have slept a minute, so he's not particularly surprised when Byrne joins him at the kitchen counter with a mug and a pleading expression. He obliges, and the defence attorney takes a grateful sip without waiting for it to cool; burns his mouth and swears.

"Alright?" Badd asks, gruffly, eyeing his own steaming coffee cup with patient anticipation.

"Fine," Byrne answers, with some asperity, made irritable with exhaustion. "I wish you would tell Calisto this is pointless. Without blueprints we can't _do_ anything more."

"Tell her yourself," Tyrell suggests, daring a sip and finding his bravery ill-advised.

Byrne doesn't respond; merely watches him wince his way through a burnt tongue with an expression that is a mixture of distracted sympathy and reluctant misery. It's one Tyrell recognizes all too well, and seeing it again ignites an odd kind of jealousy.

"Yew's gotten very good at managing you, Byrne."

Once spoken, Badd can't figure out how to take back his intonation, but thankfully, it doesn't seem to matter: Byrne is apparently too distracted to notice, suddenly setting down his coffee mug with a gesture that bespeaks grim determination.

"Tyrell…" There's an expression on the prosecutor's face that Badd doesn't particularly like, but he can't quite put his finger on why. "Do you ever wonder how she does it?"

Even Badd is not contrary enough to pretend he doesn't know what Byrne's talking about.

"Well," he supplies, carefully, "she's worked a handful of BLU Corp cases by now. She must be getting to be a common sight around there…"

"So?" Byrne leans towards him, argumentatively, slipped unconsciously into his courtroom persona. "That's not enough, and we're too good at what we do not to know it, Tyrell. Right now, you're thinking exactly what I'm thinking; admit it."

But Badd will never admit it, not even to himself, and least of all to Byrne Faraday. Some things just aren't meant to come out, and as far as Tyrell is concerned, the residue sexual fantasies of an over-the-hill police detective about a woman young enough to be his daughter fit neatly into this category.

"Deiter would never be taken in by that," he counters evasively instead, and Byrne raises an eyebrow.

"Don't you think?" He sounds thoughtful, laying a hand on the counter next to his forgotten coffee cup, but Badd can tell he's still playing to some invisible audience of jurors by the deliberate tilt of his head. "Calisto isn't some sixteen-year-old innocent, trying to flirt with her high school teacher, Tyrell. I think she's perfectly capable of winding Deiter around her little finger."

Badd makes a sound of frustration in the back of his throat: why is Byrne pushing this? The prosecutor can be clumsy, Tyrell knows, and at times short-sighted when it comes to lines on the ground, but why does _this_ have to be the one he comes so close to over-stepping? He and Faraday have been skirting an even thinner line since well before they became the Yatagarasu, and after all this time, it is _Calisto Yew_ that catches his attention? It must be jealousy that makes his voice come out so biting.

"If his secretary is any indication, Byrne, the bastard likes blondes, not brunettes."

"You don't find Calisto attractive?" The prosecutor is an odd mixture of offended and curious that makes Tyrell defensive.

"I'd be blind not to," he mutters, "but where the hell are you going with this, Faraday?"

This seems to be the right question, because Byrne's expression cages off again, and there is nothing even faintly prosecutorial in his subsequent fidgeting. "I'm not sure," he admits after a moment. "Only that sometimes I don't think you realize what we're risking, every time we do this. You think the security guards on Deiter's detail are going to turn us over to the police if they catch us? And even if they did, do you think I'd be a good father to Kay from a jail-cell, Tyrell?" There is a silence in which Byrne shakes his head; when he continues his voice is uncharacteristically bitter. "I'd rather they shoot us."

"I know all of this," Badd forces from behind gritted teeth. He is angry, for some reason; angry that Byrne would speak of what they have long agreed not to even _think_ of. "What's your point?"

Suddenly, there's a sound like fingernails on wood, and they look around to see Calisto draped comfortably around the doorframe, watching them, eyes wide with sleeplessness rather than shock.

"It's alright," she says quickly as they look at her, straightening a little under their gaze. "It's alright; continue."

But Byrne doesn't, and his eyes are bright when he turns back to the kitchen counter. "Tyrell," he says, softly, and Badd cannot help but notice that there is only the faintest hesitation in his voice now; the rest overwhelmed by a generous portion of some other, stronger emotion: "Tyrell; say something."

"Coffee, Calisto?"

Tyrell indicates Byrne's long abandoned mug invitingly with one hand, and for a second, Calisto's smug expression flickers. Beside him, Byrne stirs like he will speak, and Tyrell's heart holds its breath in his chest, hypersensitive beyond beating.

"We've got a long night ahead of us."

Calisto smiles and unwinds from the doorframe. "Sure, Detective. Oh, and Byrne, I've come across something interesting. You might want to take a look at it; I'm no expert, but I think it might help your prosecution."

As Tyrell rummages around for a mug, Byrne dives for his coffee cup to hide his expression before turning around. "What did you find?"

"Some interesting wording on behalf of the then-prosecutor, Mr. Faler, during Deiter's cross-examination. Something about it seems to have gotten under Deiter's skin, but I can't quite put my finger on what. You might have more luck."

"Show me," Byrne says, abandoning his coffee once more on the counter, and Tyrell, busy filling a kettle with water, closes his eyes for one long, protracted second.

* * *

So far, introspection has unearthed nothing but a mess of coagulated emotions like blood from a wound, but if there is any moment when he is guilty of a truly willing self-deception, Detective Badd thinks it must be the night Calisto gets injured infiltrating BLU Corp headquarters in search of the surveillance records that will validate their corruption charges. She has gone in partly blind, spurred by impatience into relying on an older and less accurate version of the building's blueprints than any of them would like, and so he and Byrne are in the car, busily expecting things to go wrong to the background of a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack played on the lowest setting when they violently oblige.

By the time they get her indoors, her shoes are drenched and blood is darkening the hem of her trousers. Byrne is in one of his oddly professional panics, muttering to himself tersely under his breath, his mind clearly several steps ahead of the present moment, his mouth a crooked slash as he pre-empts dire eventualities. Grim but oddly calm, Tyrell lays Calisto out on his couch and goes into the kitchen for a saucepan of water while Byrne carefully hikes up the torn material of Calisto's pants-leg and stares at her wound.

"It's deep, but not too deep," he is telling her feverishly when Tyrell comes back, saucepan in hand. "It'll need stitches, though. At least, I think so. Tyrell's got a pretty well-stocked medicine cabinet, but I've only done this once before, so maybe an ER's the best option, hoping they won't ask too many questions. Calisto?"

She lifts her head to meet his eyes before dropping it back onto the cushion. "No ER. You do it."

Byrne only hesitates a moment before nodding, the line of his mouth dipping downwards with determination, and leaves the room. In his absence, Tyrell takes his spot and upends a generous amount of water onto Calisto's knee, letting it trickle slowly down towards her wound to the sound of her hissing. As he watches the angry red of her bleeding dilute and expand over the whiteness of her leg, the foremost feeling in him is relief. He has patched up a partner or two before, on the job, and he knows how to clean a wound like nobody's business, but _patched up_ has never meant stitched up before, and trust Byrne to know what to do.

When the defence attorney returns, Badd has finished and Calisto's injury is looking cleaner, and much less serious for it. He gets up to make room, and Byrne settles on his knees by Calisto, shirt rolled up to his elbows. He chats disarmingly as he works, peeling things out of plastic packets and unscrewing the lid of a small, monstrously pink bottle of tincture of iodine that Byrne recognizes from an unwanted first-aid-kit, his punishment for misguidedly mentioning a fondness for hiking to an old colleague. There is the same uncomfortable mixture of terror and confidence in his voice as earlier, and when he starts dabbing disinfectant on her wound, Calisto tells him to shut up in between the sound of her teeth gritting. Byrne manages to stay quiet for an entire minute until the panic sets him talking again.

"I'm surprised it's not worse, actually," he announces as he needles the edges of the wound together. Calisto makes a sound Tyrell remembers well from stepping on the family cat's tail a great deal in boyhood. "I had a friend in law school who got bitten by a neighbour's guard-dog trying to fetch a soccer ball, and he said the worst part was getting the damn creature to _let go_. If I remember correctly, he had to wait until the owners came home, and by then he'd lost all feeling in his leg." A thoughtful frown wrinkles Byrne's forehead. "It's lucky you got loose, Calisto. Security would probably have recognized you as Deiter's lawyer."

Up until this point, Calisto has remained perfectly still and mostly silent, but when Byrne tries to press a thin layer of gauze against her wound her shoulders give a violent shiver. Suddenly, she throws an arm out, and it hits Tyrell in the chest, briefly winding him before he catches it and winds her cold fingers around his. A quick glance at her face shows her bottom lip white beneath her teeth.

"I suppose it helped," she says then, thinly, "that I shot the damn thing."

Byrne doesn't stop winding, but his face whitens. "What?"

"Like you said, the stupid mutt wouldn't let go of me, so I…shot…" Calisto's sentence tails off in a gradual decrescendo, and she lets her explanation hang unfinished, eyes wavering shut. Her face has gone oddly grey now that Byrne is finished, as though she has realized bravery is no longer needed. As she hovers on the edge of unconsciousness, Byrne gets up from his knees and looks at him, and neither of them speaks.

_A gun_, Tyrell remembers thinking, blankly. _And with a silencer, too, or else we would've heard it from the car_. _Why the hell does Calisto own a gun? _He thinks of her wedding ring, where it lies at the bottom of the sea, three hours from the city, and wonders, suddenly, if there isn't more to find there.

"Tyrell…my things…" Unnoticed by both of them, Calisto has successfully fended off sleep, and she turns her tear-struck eyes unsteadily towards him, voice unnaturally weak.

Wordlessly, Badd nods. He finds Calisto's backpack where they left it, sitting unceremoniously by the entrance mat, the zipper half open and congealing red slowly. Badd picks it up, and hesitates. There are a few items poking out through the opening, inconsequential things like Yew's notebook, her compact, and a lumpy shape Tyrell recognizes as the pair of rolled up gloves she likes to wear on their missions.

"Tyrell."

Badd looks around, feeling oddly guiltless, to find Byrne standing in the doorway. He is speaking softly, eyes honeyed, and his body seems to melt into the doorframe around him, all too literally relieved.

"Tyrell, she's out. I'm going to pour myself a glass of your bourbon. Do you want some?"

In a relieved silence, Badd follows Byrne back to the living room, a mildly grumpy, mostly playful answer about offering people their own alcohol on the tip of his tongue. When he sees Calisto Yew, finally asleep, supine and unusually delicate-seeming on his second-hand sofa, he swallows it, and careful to whisper, says, instead, "Please."

* * *

As it turns out, this is not the last of their troubles with BLU Corp.

"_What the hell was that_?"

Tyrell remembers it perfectly: it is sometime between late afternoon and next morning, and the three of them are cloistered in one of the local courthouse's conference rooms. Before him, Byrne paces back and forth, hands in his pockets, the expression on his face justifying all the risk they are running with this impromptu meeting; while Calisto Yew stands by the door, briefcase in hand, looking unnaturally tall.

Two colossi, and him in the shadows of the room's corner, watching.

"That went _terribly_! I'm surprised the judge didn't announce a verdict on the spot!"

Slits of light are making their way into the room through the shuttered windows, and they stripe the front of Byrne's suit jacket with alternating shadow and light. As he turns to face them, the light slides across his face, dividing it just under his eyes into two equally furious halves.

"Dammit, Byrne, I'm doing the best I can." Although she sounds it, Tyrell can tell by her posture that Calisto's not angry yet, not really; only frustrated, and cornered, like a cat in an alleyway, and silently, he echoes the sentiment. Lately, there has been something in Byrne's criticisms that makes them harder to hear than they should be; some note of poorly disguised terror that only gets louder with each iteration, and they have played out this scene so often it now sounds like a siren. "Deiter was grilling me at the Detention Centre yesterday, about how I didn't want him to take the stand. If I hadn't given in, he'd have fired me. My hands were tied."

"And if we lose the case because of that testimony, Yew? That'll be eight months wasted, trying to bring BLU Corp down!"

Unlike him and Calisto, Byrne has never been one for using last names, and hearing him do so now makes Tyrell feel curiously unsettled. There is something about that type of appellation that has always appealed to him, powerfully: the curt comfortableness of it, of _Yew_ and _Faraday_ and _Badd_, but it sounds ugly on Byrne; laughably unsuited to him, like clothing several sizes too small. For a prosecutor whose strength relies on his warmth, his anger of late is a great deal too cold, and to hear it, Tyrell finds himself longing for the man's former temper: notoriously fiery, but always fleeting, and leaving him worn out and compliant in its wake.

Thankfully, Calisto has come to know Byrne nearly as well as he does over the past year, and she does not misread the note in his voice. Instead, she merely sets down her briefcase, folds her arms over her chest and regards him complacently. "The evidence you'll present tomorrow will speak much louder than Deiter's testimony did today, Byrne. You needn't worry about him getting away."

"I'm not—" Byrne drops clumsily into a seat at the conference table, flattening his palms on the table's surface with a sound of exhaustion. "It was an unnecessary risk! You should have found a way to deter him!"

"Now _you're_ the one suggesting unnecessary risks!" Finally, there's real anger in Calisto's voice, and it fills the room like a noxious electricity. "Maybe you've forgotten, but I have a reputation to uphold. If I stop getting hired, what use will I be to the Yatagarasu then? As I've told you before, Deiter doesn't _need_ handling; our case is sufficiently strong as is, and in the meantime, getting fired certainly won't inspire confidence in prospective clients. So I made a judgement call, Byrne—_a good one_, and the fact that you can't recognize that is _not_ my problem."

The silence that follows settles over them like radioactive dust. Tyrell finds himself holding very still as he watches; in this suddenly too-quiet room, the slightest motion would sound like a trumpet.

"But what…if it isn't enough after all?"

The words come out slowly, painstakingly, pushing through a silence like wet concrete. Byrne is speaking to the conference table, and he doesn't look up as he continues.

"All those months of working towards this…months buried in blueprints and court transcripts and covering our footsteps…"

And finally, finally, _finally_,Badd has had enough of holding still and keeping quiet; has had enough of his comfortable corner where the light does not reach. How can he play sentinel to Calisto and Byrne's toy soldiers, watching outward whilst they curl and sleep, if it means turning his back while Byrne threatens to pick apart the knot from the very centre? Their hero is somewhere else tonight, somewhere Calisto's affronted fury cannot reach, and now it is Tyrell's turn to grasp and fumble, in any which way he can. He will do it, and he will succeed, because for all that he is blinded, Tyrell knows enough of what underlies his friend's golden surface to recognize that Byrne the lawyer, Byrne the truth-teller, does not always want honesty.

When he moves forward, the prosecutor's eyes dart up to his; wide, and no longer quite so tired. It is all the confirmation he needs.

"Tyrell?"

Calisto's voice is soft, only lightly questioning, but Tyrell ignores her, dropping into a seat at the conference table in front of Byrne instead, before reaching into his coat pocket for his mirror.

"No one's behind you!" Byrne blurts suddenly, nervously, but Tyrell only throws him an incongruously polite look and angles the mirror for confirmation. Calisto's face, still and attentive, flashes briefly over its surface.

"Except Calisto," he agrees eventually, softly. "Just like there isn't anyone behind _you_, Byrne. So stop looking over your shoulder. We didn't miss anything…and _we're not wrong_. It's time we put this case to rest."

For a moment, Byrne seems to teeter on the edge of relief, but then he swallows and shakes his head. "No. _No. _I think...I think BLU Corp has cards we haven't predicted. Deiter's too confident, Tyrell. You were in court today; you saw him talking. He _must_ have guessed our hand by now, so why isn't he more worried? Calisto's telling him she'll get him off, but he must realize she can't, so what is he hiding? What's he _planning_?"

"Byrne, whatever story he's concocted for the judge, words are just words." Leaning over Tyrell's shoulder, Calisto sounds brittle but not unkind. Badd does not have to be facing her to know she is rolling her eyes, but her exasperation is gentle and unusually patient. Some of the poison has gone out of the air. "In the meantime, we have _evidence_—papers detailing every single one of their dirty transactions. There's no way he can talk himself out of that."

"You're right," Byrne mutters, "you're right." But then he doesn't get up, and he doesn't look up, and after a moment, Calisto moves back and picks up her briefcase with an audible sound. Tyrell twists around to watch her.

"_Well_." Straightening, she tucks her hair behind her ears and slides her compact out of the front pocket of her briefcase. As she talks, Calisto touches up her makeup, dabbing her cheeks with unnecessary powder and adding a layer of lipstick to her almost uncomfortably pristine mouth. It is a routine Tyrell is coming to recognize as her farewell ritual. "Byrne, I'm sorry about today's testimony, but I did my best to stop it. In any case, I really have to get home and get some rest before tomorrow."

Tyrell nods, and Byrne stays silent, but Calisto doesn't move for the door immediately. Her eyes sweep between the two of them first, and she opens her mouth to speak; swallows back something, and then rests her eyes on Tyrell's, meaningfully. Tyrell refuses to blink. It would be so easy, he thinks: a syllable, half-uttered and long-in-coming, loud against the backdrop of the quietly turning door handle—if only he had a voice with which to speak—

"_Wait_."

Tyrell isn't aware the sound has come from him until Byrne looks up from where he's been inspecting the countertop and furrows his eyebrows questioningly. The detective looks away, dry swallowing; finds himself meeting Calisto's eyes instead. Her face is as still and perfect as ever, and the curve of her mouth is faintly pleased. Tyrell twists back towards Byrne again, quickly: he is the lesser force on this particular terrain, and like a coward, it is to this lesser force that Tyrell chooses to speak.

"You're going to sit here worrying until court tomorrow, aren't you?"

In lieu of an answer, Byrne starts pulling documents out from his own briefcase, where it rests against the leg of his chair. They come out in piles, document after document concealed behind clear plastic, each headed with a number between one and 243, and Byrne flicks through them with professional swiftness before selecting a page and settling down to scan its columns. Tyrell watches this spectacle with a strangely muted dismay, all too aware of Calisto standing motionless behind him, silently awaiting the cue he is struggling to give. In the end, it is easy enough: a half-turn in her direction and Calisto releases the handle and turns the key in the lock. The sound makes Byrne look up, mid-way through scrawling what looks to be his nine-hundredth annotation in this particular document's margin, and then Calisto moves forward to stand beside Tyrell, fingers gripping the table's wooden edge as she leans over it, inspecting Byrne's papers upside-down with a semblance of curiosity. Her dark hair spills over her shoulders and onto the document Byrne is busy annotating, extracting a shaky sigh from the prosecutor's throat.

"If you lose tomorrow due to nerves, Faraday, I'll never forgive you."

"Calisto." Byrne's voice comes out scratchy, dry; from his seated position, Badd watches him brush aside Calisto's hair in order to set down his pen and cap it, the movement slightly too controlled to be convincing. "What are you doing? I need to—focus."

"Focus?" Tyrell echoes, slowly, as though he's unsure of the prosecutor's word-choice, and Byrne's eyes dart over to his. Calisto's, however, don't, and it ignites something like courage in him: not jealousy, but safety, in not doing this—or _feeling_ this—alone. "Do you think you'll be able to focus easily tomorrow? Knowing that eight months have been building up to this? Knowing that if you _screw up_—"

As expected, the change in tone catches Byrne off guard, and he makes a little, startled sound in the back of his throat that makes Tyrell swallow. "…knowing that if you screw up," he resumes after a moment, more slowly, "it's _all you_…and you've let us down?"

For a second he doesn't think Byrne will answer, but then he does, reluctant but calm, and a mixture of relief and eagerness jumps within Tyrell's chest. "No. No, I don't suppose it will be."

"Neither do I," Calisto agrees, and when she matter-of-factly ducks her head to meet Byrne's mouth with hers, Tyrell is struck by how easily it happens.

* * *

Seven hundred and ninety-two days later, it ends, just as easily. Suddenly, the Yatagarasu is no more. Tyrell's life normalizes, sheds secrets like layers to become something small, and leaves behind nineteen thousand and eight hours of selective blindness and tunnel vision for the detective in him to dissect. One million, one hundred and forty thousand, four hundred and eighty minutes of memories for the man in him to forget.

Tyrell accomplishes the latter with the help of the liquor store and a handful of watery ice cubes: the tried and true method. For the first few weeks, it _works_, and everything is seamless and blissfully fuzzy until he arrives home one evening to find a car parked conspicuously outside his apartment, a piece of A4 paper fluttering on its windshield. Tyrell, drunk enough to be curious, holds it down flat and squints.

_Sorry about Byrne_, the note reads. The font is standard and unremarkable, 12 point Courier New. _Not my idea._

Months later, Tyrell has finally begun to stop dreaming of driving the black sedan when he recognizes its number-plate in one of the files sitting in his in-tray. It makes a stinging kind of sense: Calisto does not give gifts, and who is better at disposing of evidence than Detective Tyrell Badd? Staring down at the number, he is tempted, sorely tempted, to force the file down the throat of the office shredder and pretend he's never seen it. Then the thought makes him laugh, stumble across a long-sought truth.

He has never stopped trusting Calisto Yew.

* * *

**A/N: **Verb-tense fuckery is intentional. I just like to specify this. You can still tell me it sucks and is confusing and doesn't work, and that's cool. But just, yeah. XD

**A/N 2: **One more quibble I want to pre-empt, to do with realism. I agonized and agonized over whether to have Byrne stitch up Calisto's wound. XD I spent a handful of hours on About and Wikipedia trying to find a solution that would be sufficiently serious to have Calisto give something away, without it being too improbable for Byrne to manage, if nervously and unwisely, with the obviously limited medical knowledge I'd given him. And yet, I kept coming back to the idea of sutures for various, trope-related reasons I won't specify; and then I decided, what the hell. Since when has Gyakuten Saiban ever bothered too seriously with realism? The game has too much of its own internal logic to let realism ruin any of its fun: so many instances of "well, I _guess_, in _theory_, it's _technically possible_" that manage to avoid startling through carefully light handling. I hope to have achieved something of the same, but if I haven't, please let me know.

**A/N 3: **A couple more quibbles, actually, before I go to sleep: semi-colons and commas cannot be used interchangeably, _I'm sorry and I suck on this point_; I overuse italics, and I will work on this; my characterization of Byrne is very particular, but given how little we were given of the character, I feel like I haven't deviated too egregiously, though this is arguable; I absolutely fucking love these three, and I hope you guys will too.


End file.
